Winterberry

Winterberry The Crown Jewel Of The Yard! 

Can you believe these berries!  This plant really steals the show.  I love to take clipping and include this in arrangements.  If you are wanting a plant with berries but no sharp leaves or thorny stems than winterberry is the plant for you.  I first read about this beautiful bush years ago in Traditional Home magazine.  They would do a regular feature that focused on a particular plant and included an offer to purchase them.  I learned from the article that I would need to purchase a male and a female plant to have berries.  Sometime during the next year a friend located some plants for us locally and my husband planted one male and two females beside our fountain.  The results as you see are amazing.  We have had the plants for several years.  We have cut them way back at least on one occasion and we cut from them for arrangements.  I guess the berries are not appealing to the birds until late in January.  Either that or they are just being kind to let me enjoy them through the holidays.  

This is one of the female plants.  The other one is further back and the male plant is beside it.  The male plant has no berries on it at  all, you can't see it in this picture.   I found this website that had some instructions on growing winterberry.

Here is one of the pictures I took of the winterberry covered in snow.  Just beautiful no matter the season.  

The plants start out nice and green with no berries in the spring.  Sorry I don't have a picture.  These three pictures are of the winterberry in the summer.  I haven't really taken notice of when the berries begin to form.

Winterberry in summer up close.






















These two photos we taken in early fall.  You can tell that the leaves are staring to turn.  They will all fall off leaving only the stems and beautiful red berries.  This plant will grow in zones 3-9. 

 Our house is set back off the road in the woods and in the winter when I pull in the drive after dark I am greeted by this beautiful red glow.  We shine a light on our fountain and the glow is from the light reflecting off of the red berries.  I hesitated to include this picture because I am not a professional photographer and this really does not capture the amazing glow.   I could use some hints on how to photograph at night.  I tried every mode I could think of.  This was the best shot.  I'm going to do a little research and try to get a better picture.

I do recommend you add this plant to your landscape because of it's promise of year long pleasure.  - Marianne